Marketing Stamina – Revisited

B2B, life time value, Marketing, Marketing Stamina, persistence

On the 28th of October last year I had put up a post on this topic. If you are interested, you can have a look at it here .

The reason I felt a need to revisit this topic, came up because, I was analysing the average time it takes to get traction for a new product or service in the B2B market. If you are in the technology market space I would highly recommend you read the book Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore. It will give you a more detailed context to what I am talking.

However coming back to the B2B market – the key issue that needs to handled is corporate inertia. In most cases the people in these companies are fighting so many battles, that they don’t want to touch anything that’s not broken. Also because there’s so many approvals involved, they don’t want to risk the product / solution Not Working in their environment. Especially in case of technology solutions, most companies prefer to work with “n-1” technology because it’s stable and working. They don’t want one more fire in their hand.

The other thing which plays a role in my opinion, is that the customer wants to see your resilience. They don’t trust anyone approaching them new, for the same points as I listed above and in most cases they are already covered with an existing vendor who is providing decently good service. So until and unless the incumbent screws up some time soon, they won’t look at you.

So does it mean that you can’t get into business for the B2B segment.

You absolutely can, if you can plan for the long term. You ensure that you have enough persistence and finances to last you for a long duration. While I learnt the term marketing stamina from Dean Graziosi, I learnt the application of this idea through Dean Jackson. His thought process is like this – if you know the turnover rate of any market – say 5% – 10% of the people will change to a new vendor every year – and you have a focussed list of 1000 prospects then over the next 5 years at least 250 – 500 prospects.

Now depending on what you sell and what is the Life Time Value of a client, you will need to have the staying power to last through the 5 years with consistently reaching out to these customers. If you don’t plan for this, you will be in for a rude shock and you will do things out of desperation, which is never a good thing.

Till next time then ….build your marketing stamina before getting into a new market.

Carpe Diem!!!

Persistence is a critical aspect in B2B marketing – 2

B2B, Customers, Marketing, Marketing Stamina, messaging, persistence, Triggers

In yesterday’s post I had mentioned Dean Jackson’s philosophy on 100/1000 leads – where 50% of them will change the incumbent in the next 3 years. The only challenge is that we don’t know which ones will. Its a game of patience int he B2B space.

Changing an incumbent need not be the exact category of what you sell. The “incumbent” in the B2B space is about how the customer presently gets the job done.

If presently someone licks a stamp on their tongue before sticking it on the envelope, then this is the incumbent , if someone is trying to sell a franking machine. Now until the person whose tongue is used to lick the stamp quits for a better job ( a trigger) or someone in the company realises that keeping this person only for the “licking” is an expensive option (another trigger) your messages for the franking product or services will not work.

However whenever a trigger takes place with respect to the incumbent, if you are present in front of the customer, then you become the first person they will call.

So you need to have the persistence and marketing stamina , to ensure that you are in front of the stakeholders on a regular basis. In case of B2B this is one way you build your brand. The other aspect is to make your messages “instigating” the dissonance. Slowly hammering away at possible problem areas.

Tomorrow we will look at another aspect of this persistence story.

Till then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Persistence is a critical aspect in B2B marketing

B2B, Marketing, Marketing Stamina, messaging, persistence

As a marketers we generally like to send out a message and expect to get a response. Very few times you will get some response, but in most cases it takes a long long time.

Earlier I used to hear numbers like 7 to 12 contacts before a contact will respond. So people used to talk about running multi touch campaigns between email, voicemail and cold calling. However especially after Covid struck and a lot of people were working from home, the primary means of connecting has been email or to a certain extent Linkedin.

While I don’t have statistics on how many touch points you need to have before a response is received I got some research done on different geographies for response to emails. On an average its taking more than 20 email messages to be sent (these are cold emails) on different service lines before a given service line attracted a response.

Now this is a critical aspect if you are getting into the B2B space. As I have mentioned multiple times earlier in different posts, B2B buying is not impulsive so even if the message is interesting, you may not get a response. The second aspect to be kept in mind is that identifying the right person in the hierarchy who can act on the message. Designations can be deceptive.

So you need to have marketing stamina to be in the game for the long haul. As Dean Jackson says – look at it as a 3-5 year project. Out of a bunch of 100/1000 leads at least 50% will change their incumbent vendors. You only don’t know which ones will. Tomorrow we will look at another aspect of this.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Marketing Stamina

B2B, Marketing, Marketing Stamina, persistence

This is a phrase I first heard from Dean Graziosi. I have written about it earlier also . Its a very simple thought process. I have used it in terms of B2B marketing but I would guess it would apply in all kinds of marketing.

The logic is that every market takes time to adapt to a new offering that you bring to the market. It could be because of inertia in B2B setups because of the sheer number of people involved in making decisions as well as the complexity of processes.

If you don’t have the stamina to last through the cycle before the adoption of your offering “crosses the chasm”. This stamina is both in terms of finances and your own abilities to persist.

Today I got a different view of this . You would have read about my philosophy of riding the elephant to get access to markets. We had been riding one very large OEM for a certain set of tools. Between 2014 and 2016 we invested a lot before we got any business. But subsequent to that we got a lot of business which suddenly dried up by 2019 because the OEM decided to take a different direction (I have written about these in the challenges when riding the elephant)

Now however today I got a call from one of the reps of the OEM checking if we still have the team that was created. Generally we prefer to play the long game. So we had kept the team because we had some residue business that we were closing, while we were evaluating our options with other OEMs.

The OEM now wants to utilize the same team to go out in the market with the new products that they are launching.

If we didn’t have the marketing stamina (if we had not planned with a long term view) we would not have been able to today get a jump start.

Think long-term and plan accordingly.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!